More from the Warnerese to English translator

Mark Warner has been busy over the last couple of days, but the Warnerese-English translator launched two days ago is keeping up with him.

Although there is no new speech transcript (I figure he’s repeating his stump speech more or less), there are a few new snippets that caught my attention.  Again the English version is in bold and italics.  We’ll start with Iraq.

Washington Times - “Americans are spending $11 billion to $12 billion a month [in Iraq] while Iraq is sitting on $70 billion worth of oil profits.”

If we forced Iraq to pay the entire bill, they’d be broke in six months and still be facing a two-front war against Iranian proxies and al-Qaeda, but by then the election will be over, so it’s no skin off my nose!

The Hook - “The Iraqi government is sitting on $70 billion in oil revenues right now.  The only way we ratchet up the pressure on them is to begin to bring our troops home . . . I don’t believe you can set a (withdrawal) date, but I do think we have to make sure it’s not an open-ended, 100-year engagement.”

Calling for victory in Iraq would be an enormous political risk, and we all know how much I hate that; so I’m throwing out the $70-billion number again to distract all of you.  Besides, “seventy” has a “v” in it, too!

Lynchburg News and Advance - Asked about a controversial proposal to mine a uranium deposit near Chatham, Warner said, “I don’t know enough about the science to weigh in on that.”

Asked about a controversial proposal to mine a uranium deposit near Chatham, Warner meant, “Until I see some polling on it, you won’t get an opinion out of me with the jaws of life.”

Daily News Record - “Ten years from now, if we are as dependent on foreign oil as we are now, we are up the creek.”

Ten years from now, you’ll probably figure out that Canada passed Saudi Arabia as our largest outside oil supplier.  If that happens, my party is up the creek.

I get the feeling the translator will be in for quite a workout this year!